A Repository for Bottled Monsters: Creative use of Museum's Civil War photos at Flickr

Friday, July 22, 2011

Creative use of Museum's Civil War photos at Flickr

Here's a nice research use of the Civil War pictures we've been putting online -

From: Brendan Hamilton

I've recently been looking through the fantastic gallery of Civil War medical photographs you and your colleagues have been putting up on Flickr, and I got the idea of writing up brief profiles of the soldiers in them and posting them on my blog: http://vanishedhand.blogspot.com/

As a Civil War geek and poet, I'm more interested in the human side than the clinical info., so I thought I'd dig through the muster rolls, census info, etc., to try to paint some picture of who these people are. A macabre effort but that's what grabs me. I've only written up one soldier so far but I intend to do more in the coming weeks.

- his one soldier is Frederick Bentley.

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Who are we?

Mike Rhode was the chief archivist of the Museum from 1989-2011, and is the founder of this blog. I maintain an interest in the course of the museum, and will be posting relevant information.

The Army Medical Museum was founded in 1862 during the American Civil War. After World War II, a parent-child relationship was inverted and the Museum became part of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Since then, the Museum has moved around Washington, stopping for years in Ford's Theatre, and on the National Mall where the building it shared with the National Library of Medicine once stood, until it was demolished in 1968 for the Hirshhorn Museum. For 35 years it was at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and now is in Silver Spring, MD.

So what about that blog name?

It's historical. I found it in a quote from one of the former curators. World War II confirmed the Army Medical Museum's primary role in pathology consultation. James Ash, the curator during the war and a pathologist, noted, "Shortly after the last war, more concerted efforts were instituted to concentrate in the Army Medical Museum the significant pathologic material occurring in Army installations." He closed with the complaint, "We still suffer under the connotation museum, an institution still thought of by many as a repository for bottled monsters and medical curiosities. To be sure, we have such specimens. As is required by law, we maintain an exhibit open to the public, but in war time, at least, the museum per se is the least of our functions, and we like to be thought of as the Army Institute of Pathology, a designation recently authorized by the Surgeon General."

After the war, it evolved into the tri-service Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.

A Repository for Bottled Monsters

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Friday, July 22, 2011

Creative use of Museum's Civil War photos at Flickr

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